Did you know that if you are happy you’ll:
- have 23% less stress in your life
- be 39% healthier
- experience 31% more productivity
- have a 34% increase in positive social interaction
No, me neither. But this has been shown in a meta analysis of 225 studies conducted by Harvard researchers Sonja Lyubomirsky, Laura King, and Ed Diener.
Basically, if you cultivate a positive mind-set you will perform better in the face of challenge, you’ll be generally healthier and you stand a far better chance of being able to achieve your goals.
Most of us approach life with the mindset of “WHEN I achieve that, THEN I’ll be happy” with the “when” part being ever elusively in the future and leaving us constantly in a state of chasing that. If we only could stop and realize that it actually works the other way around, we would all live a far more fulfilling and happy life.
In other words when you feel happy, THEN you will achieve that.
Finding contentment in the NOW is one of life’s biggest challenges, but thankfully research has shown that a few simple daily habits can go a long way towards helping us achieve it. And, since happiness is the precursor to so many other “successes” in life, we then stand a far greater chance at those other achievements also. Plus, who wants to put off being happy, since that is usually the goal overall anyway? So, if we can crack that, then it’s a win win situation!
So how do you get happy now?
Here are a few simple examples of things you can start doing today to bring yourself a step closer to that state. We’ll go into some of them in more detail in other posts, but for now:
- Each morning write down 3 NEW things your are grateful/happy for
- Meditate for at least 3 minutes each day (don’t tell me you don’t have 3 minutes)
- Exercise – even if it’s just moving vigorously for 10 minutes a day – GET MOVING
- Perform a random act of kindness for someone each day
- Journal for a couple minutes each day about something that made you grateful in the last 24 hours
- Visualize yourself as happy – spend 5 minutes each morning visualizing yourself beaming with joy
- Smile – we all know that the body follows the mind, but the mind also is affected by the body. The simple act of smiling begins to turn our mood into a more positive state
- Say something positive to someone today
Even if you do just a couple of these activities regularly, over time you’ll start to feel a general uplift in mood and, by extension, productivity, creativity and achievement. And before you know it, you’ll be that much closer to all those goals you associate with “success”.
But that won’t even matter because you’ll be happy already before you even get there!
Which one will you try this week?